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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

SmartAboutThings writes "Recently, Apple has been on a hiring spree, allegedly adding to its 100+ team of members of the iWatch team a sleep expert, a former expert in pulse oximetry and many others. Now, according to a recent job listing on Apple's own website, it seems that Cupertino is looking for physiologists for fitness and energy tests. In my opinion, this can only mean that the iWatch is nearing its final stage and that experts are required to assess how it fares."

Why in Odin's name would a company buy a site whose user base was historically so anti M$ and expect that they could make money from it by changing it to a M$/advertising oriented site. It reeks of affluenza enhanced megalomania. Someone's gonna buy this site for pennies in a few months.

And have you noticed the polls? 1 out of 4 has something to do your employment status or conditions. Can you spell market research? I'll bet your resumes' IP, writing style and any other identifying data is being matched to

Why in Odin's name would a company buy a site whose user base was historically so anti M$ and expect that they could make money from it by changing it to a M$/advertising oriented site. It reeks of affluenza enhanced megalomania.

Because sites like Slashdot were VERY influential in communicating public opinion on just how bad Vista was.

Microsoft recognized that, and engaged Waggener Edstrom and Burson-Marsteller to manage Social Media Marketing (SMM) for Windows 7 onwards. They used huge numbers of sock-puppet teams to quash any suggestion that Microsoft products were not stable or optimum in their roles. As well as promoting Microsoft, they heavily attacked competitors like Firefox, Google, Linux, Libre Office, Android etc. Any posting of FOSS or alternative products attracted a storm of FUD talking points that made it impossible to have a rational discussion.

Because the discussions became so polluted with marketers, most of Slashdot's readership left the site in the years between the Windows 7 release and now. The marketers have stayed though, and still post and moderate to present as rosy a view of their sponsors proprietary products as possible, while spewing FUD about Open Source. If you look at Slashdot's current demographic, most visitors are from call-centers in Mumbai and Pune in IndiaMumbai and Pune in India [alexa.com]. They rarely contribute directly to discussions, but copy/paste/post the SMM talking points at every opportunity and moderate their partners into visibility and competitors to oblivion.

Dice gets most of their income from companies like Microsoft, Apple etc who pay for their products to receive favorable and frequent attention.

The new site responds better, looks better, and has some nice features.I especially like how you don't actually list issue you have

Exactly like how you don't actually list what the "nice features" are. Or what you consider "better looking". Or how you're measuring the "response".

Because for most of us, the response time is either no different, or MUCH slower since you have to keep "loading more" comments over and over, instead of just "loading all".And I don't think it looks better, it wastes a shitload of screen real estate and looks like some high school project that was slapped together after a late-night masturbatory session with y

Wait, how do you load all comments? At some point, Slashdot has (always?) broken into 'pages', at some weird place.. It's breaking by sub-threads or something, which seems reasonable, except that the subsequent pages usually/always have tons of repeated content..

Because they said they're slowing down, not backing down. We say "scrap the whole thing, it can't be saved" and they say "we won't force it down your throat until we think we can get away with it." Until they give a little more ground than that, we'll have to keep pointing out that what they're saying and doing are unacceptable.

Actual discourse among intelligent adults why all the whiny complainers are away.We will be able to have an actually Apple story without people like you going on long rants, be able to have discussion about climate with all the idiot who think they matter are away.

It will be glorious.

Any chance we could get you to extend that date, to say... the year 3000?

We did. BozoBeta has been around for quite some time. Aside from a few minor cosmetic changes and a few (very few) functional improvements, it's been the same pile of fail. There have been precious few positive comments about it. When Slashdot started pushing the Beta design, the negative comments became more numerous, more strident and more detailed.

So what we get from Timothy is a bit of marketing babble liberally sloshed on to a smidgen of comprehension.

The ball is in your court, Slashdot. Figure it out, it's not really all that hard.

I learnt a important lesson about a decade ago. Here in the UK there were fuel price protests which _really_ scared the government of the day.

However, the protesters let the momentum disappear after some promises were made and by the time they realised their mistake and organised another protest, the new protest display turned out to be only a shadow of the original protests and nothing really got changed.

I was going to mod you up, but I think you'll get to 5 anyway, so instead I will add to your astute observation.

Firstly, it pleases me for Slashdotters to recognize the need for joint organizing and pressure on management, aka, a form of *union*. I'm downright impressed.

Secondly, I think there are several nations in crisis today where the protesters are acting on your words; while the sitting powers seek to divide and distract them with partial and vague promises, the protesters are taking this as the momen

Still looks great -- I prefer it to this design and to Beta. Admins, please bring back the design used around 2000. There is little whitespace, so little wasted space, larger clearer fonts, and still a lot on each page, and little or no JavaScript cruft. Besides those significant improvements, it looks warmer and more classic.

>http://web.archive.org/web/20000305021033/http://slashdot.org/
oh that page made my heart a flutter

No shit:

Banner Ads on Your Cell Phone
Technology Posted by emmett on Saturday March 04, [2000] @11:25AM
from the just-what-you-need dept.
James Ensor writes, "I'm sure you'll all be just thrilled to hear that Ericsson has developed and is implementing a way to do targeted ads on Internet enabled cellphones. They envision TV-like FMV commercials in the future.

Am I the only one who really misses those old days and still thinks that the older layout was better? Remember when the pages just loaded all the comments without JavaScript bullshit? Remember when it was still fast despite offering so much, because it was simple? It was easy on the eyes and seemed to be teeming with life and information.:-)

The current design is not as good as that older design, but one thing is certain:

BETA SUCKS. BETA SUCKS. BETA SUCKS. DICE ARE HORRIBLE UNTHINKING MONSTERS, AND SO IS A

Still looks great -- I prefer it to this design and to Beta. Admins, please bring back the design used around 2000. There is little whitespace, so little wasted space, larger clearer fonts, and still a lot on each page, and little or no JavaScript cruft. Besides those significant improvements, it looks warmer and more classic.

BETA SUCKS. FUCK BETA.

Dear Slashdot management,Can we please get a button, located at the top of each thread next tot he 'Post' button, that filters out any posts with the word 'Beta' in them when you press it?

Considering the news is days to weeks old the only value here is the COMMUNITY. We do not clap for your poorly worded couple paragraph news scrapes like a bunch of mindless buffoons, we are here to debate, and find a common ground on topics that we find interesting.

There is plenty of things to fix on slashdot, beta does not address a single one of them and makes the site pointless to visit. Your move...

And this is what I still don't understand: Why? What was the motivation for the redesign? What problems was it supposed to solve? (And if the answer is 'to better serve ads', then you might as well tell us, because we'll find out anyway.)

Try us Slashdot.... if you want to proceed with Beta then let's do the following test:

1.) Disable comments for a day2.) Post stories that are "more accessible" for your "wider audience" to consume3.) Watch your stats (we know you are obsessing over them.)4.) Tell us how you like your numbers

Don't screw this up DICE... I've enjoyed Slashdot as a community for 16 years but I am not afraid to move and it sounds like much of the community feels the same way.

I've enjoyed Slashdot as a community for 16 years but I am not afraid to move and it sounds like much of the community feels the same way.

I'm not afraid to move, it's just that I don't think anything else will be as good. reddit is good if you turn off the default subreddits and subscribe to AskHistory and such, but the commenting system comes no where near to Slashdot's (there's just so much shit on there). I guess that's why I'm commenting on this so much: I care. I want to stay here.

If there is one thing I know about this community it is that, unlike the vast majority of other communities out there, we have a huge concentration people with the knowledge, skillset, and passion to create and preserve our community without need for a corporate minder. Perhaps Slashdot beta was the kick in the pants we needed to find out how much we truly valued it. I am already looking into how I can assist in creating a new home for our community if Dice decides that they are not going to listen the comm

I agree. However, while it wouldn't be hard to replicate the system and start over anew, we would lose the years of discussions that slashdot has archived. Don't overlook the value of over a decade and a half of the discussions that have made this site what it is lo these many years. And the value, for what it's worth, of someone with a 3-4 digit ID coming into the discussion to smack someone with his/her cane. We know what that low UID means, not that the person is speaking the gospel, but mayb

I agree. You are correct about this and it would be regrettable to lose it. Hopefully DICE is sensible and starts treating the community with more respect and comes up with a solution that makes everyone happy.

The biggest challenge here is being willing to lose that historical treasure trove. If you are not willing to lose it then you have no power over the changes others are making that affect you. I would have been quite happy to stay lurking as I normally do. However, the unanimity of the response from o

Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to the beta

I hardly saw any real words of action in his post. I would rather have heard something along the lines of.. "We have mistakenly pushed beta on 25 percent of our users prematurely. We will be directing those users back to the classic site while we action your feedback regarding, fully functional commenting, over spaced generic design and fixing reported bugs. We do not intend on directing users to the beta site ag

So, I was logged in and didn't get to see the beta so I just checked it out. I have to ask something. Why oh why has light grey on lighter-grey become the new trendy style for UI? Do people no longer wish to be able to read the shit that is on a page and just mindlessly stare at a whitewashed screen? You do realize that some contrast is OK right? There is a reason that people use black type on paper. The Kindle isn't coming out with a light grey on white version to make it cooler. Fuck! It was bad enoug

I'd love to have an onboard pulse oximeter . . . being young (ish) and in good health, on the rare times that I've had it measured it was 98-99%
However, I'm very curious about what happens during:
* Intense exercise
* Illness
I've even considered buying one just to find out. . .

Perhaps instead of spamming "fuck beta" in the comments of every article, instead we could just comment as usual except with an extra phrase at the end or in the sig. The phrase in question is "Ceterum censeo Beta esse pedicandum," which basically translates as, "By the way, I think the Beta must be fucked." (Anyone who actually knows Latin should feel free to improve the phrase's grammar if necessary.) I think this would be a good way to protest now that Dice is starting to get the point. Keep doing th

Which is in the spirit of many Amazon reviews, where the comment is sort of on topic but then goes on to discuss how it might be an analogy for (or direct cause of) Slashdot's beta site sucking. Some of the posts I've seen in this vein were absolute gems.

An iWatch??? Oooooh shiny! I wish that I had an iWatch prototype so that I knew exactly when 2359 hrs rolls around on Feb. 8, and I can leave this inglorious Beta disaster once the week-long "slashcot" begins. There might not be much point in waiting for the trainwreck to begin; it's already in progress, and we're all starring in it. Dunno if I can masochistically "tough out" this entirely needless murder of my favorite discussion forum. I very rarely post, but I read a great deal of it and am always entert

look forward to some other new site/wiki/blog/Fuhrerbunker/casino where I can digitally rub shoulders with y'all in the VERY near future. There are already several posts in other current threads about a possible Altslashdot.org; who knows what other new purpose-built destinations might come to be? But I truly have very little further hope for this fascinating & enlightening place that I've been visiting since before 9/11. It's a place that I miss already, if you know what I mean.

I've been a slashdot reader for a good 15 years now and I really hope that the new beta design changes substantially before being pushed to production.

1) FAR too much white space, only two or three stories fit on my screen! This is not Windows 8 and most of us don't have the attention span of a goldfish....2) Titles have the same background as the story text. This makes it much more difficult to quickly skim the site. Look at this, I made three paragraphs and there's about an INCH of space between them!3) The comment system has been thoroughly broken.